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Following the coronavirus pandemic, many women working at Syracuse University needed to re-establish connections with their female colleagues, said Urvashi Bhattacharya, a staff member in Syracuse University’s finance and administrative services office.

To combat the isolation the pandemic caused, Bhattachary joined 25 other women in the inaugural Women in Leadership Initiative cohort, a program the university created in 2018 to help female-identifying and non binary faculty develop personal and professional skills. This fall’s cohort, which is the first to go through the program, will attend monthly experiential learning sessions.

“(The cohort) will … give (members) the skills that are needed to talk their own sort of leadership language and develop their own unique personal leadership style,” Bhattacharya said.

In 2018, hundreds of female faculty members protested the discrepancy in their pay compared to their male colleagues after a 2017 salary report revealed they earned as little as 77 cents for every dollar a male faculty member made. Last October, SU also settled a lawsuit from female faculty regarding disparities in pay for a total of $3,713,000.

The report and the subsequent protests have prompted ongoing conversations about gender inequality, said Emily Stokes-Rees, director of the School of Design and a member of the cohort. Since then, female leaders across campus have taken actions like creating the WLI to break the barriers they face at the university, Stokes-Rees said.

The program fosters a community where members can share their experiences as women or nonbinary people in leadership, such as pay disparities, and learn from each other’s work, said Marcelle Haddix, the associate provost for strategic initiatives.

“Universities across the nation are looking at the diversity on their campus and wrestling with making significant changes,” Stokes-Rees said. “Already I have connected with women leaders across the university who I have never met, and it’s just been wonderful to meet women who are ambitious and looking to learn more about leadership.”

Christine Elaine Ashby, the director of the Center on Disability and Inclusion, said she aims to empower her female colleagues and encourage her students to take on leadership roles themselves.

“(We’re) trying to go from thinking about the effect we could have on our center, but also how that can sort of ripple out in connections across campus,” Ashby said.

Cohort members hold diverse positions across campus, which allows them to establish broader connections, she said. They also bring a wider base of knowledge back to their respective departments, Ashby said.

Each year, the WLI will choose a different group of faculty based on nominations from colleagues or self-nominations to join a new cohort. Haddix, who is one of the cohort’s four leaders, said the applicant pool for the inaugural cohort was extensive, but that the leadership team hopes to expand and diversify its membership in the future to develop a broader community of female leaders on campus.

Ultimately, Bhattacharya said her goal in the cohort is to grow as an individual and have a greater impact on campus.

“I hope the cohort will arm us with the toolkit to make us effective agents of change,” Bhattacharya said. “At the end of this experience, I envision (myself) being the best version of the person that I am both inside and outside; someone that is more self aware and intentional in the way I think and the way I act.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Urvashi Bhattacharya’s name was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on September 21, 2022 at 12:05 am

Contact Isabel: iamelend@syr.edu